1x24: Bunch of Sockpuppets

On the other hand, I encourage you to vote for whomever you think presented the best debate. I’ll honor my word and donate regardless of who the victor turns out to be.

–jeremy

@jonobacon Regarding the Galaxy S5, how intuitive would you think it would be for someone who is not familiar with the Samsung UI?

Finally finished #24 and heard the politics segment. But didn’t get it. I heard the words like “a new party that is a community and a meritocracy” but didn’t understand who that isn’t already the current parties. Can you explain how you were describing something that isn’t the current parties? I see them as communities and meritocracies. in the US the spend like a year or two having giant in person public forums and a year vetting potential new leaders until they all agree in community fashion they have selected the best person to lead them. How would your system be different?

Right there with you, Dan. I couldn’t figure out what the difference really was either. :smile:

This is what I was getting at when talking about the definition of “merit”. Current political parties certainly do have a community vetting procedure, but it’s basically optimised to find those who are best at political infighting and garnering votes, not really those who will actually do the best job for their constituents. If you’re feeling charitable, then this is the right thing to do: since what politicians do is politics, it is by definition meritorious to be good at it, not least because it helps your party be better than the other parties. If you’re feeling cynical, then political parties have defined merit as “being good at being in a political party” rather than “being good at your actual job of representing your constituency and governing” because being bad at government is less important than being bad for the party’s continued existence. The truth is, as ever, a little from column A and a little from column B.

well, some of thats on us the voter too then. we’re supposed to vote for who is best and if in ther party’s experience they found that the best guy at playing politics does in fact sway a bunch of us, then damn, that’s partly our bad. this is why I think education is more important, teaching people how to think and reason so cheap tricks don’t work on them :stuck_out_tongue: otherwise a democracy and meritocracy is worthless if the majority of peole can’t think and reason about it well, we as a whole will always make poor decisions. Group theory, the group is only as smart as it’s least intelegent members, especially when they may be very very many.

Mmm. Not in this discussion. We, the hoi polloi, get to choose between the candidates from parties A, B, C, and D as to who will be our representative. We don’t get to choose which candidate party A puts up for election unless we’re actually part of the party itself.

true, but a) in the US all you have to do I think is a super easy painless registration and b) I was saying it’s a bit our fault in that they define merit as who gets votes which a long time ago someone thought was equivalent to doing a good job but lately we’ve found just means gets a lot of votes, and that if we are easily swayed by cheap politics, then ppl who do cheap politics can get a lot of votes and their parties will see them as full of merit. if we were less susceptible to cheap tricks the party definition of merit may shift some.

Yeah. I think Jono’s Big Idea wasn’t actually “let’s have a party which defines merit as helps people”, it was “let’s do that because then I bet that party wins loads of elections”. Perhaps. He may correct me here. But we didn’t get as far as “why is this Merit Party a good idea” because we were too busy pissing on the very idea of the Merit Party existing at all :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your detailed post about this!

[…] “waterschappen”, an ancient (some say outdated) level of government tasked with water management, protection against floods and such.

Is this organised geographically by watersheds or other natural features? If yes, it could be a model for the future. The EU has only recently (started to) organise water management that way. Relying on artificial instead of natural boundaries of course complicating the whole process :frowning:

About the parent topic. The German Pirate party has unfortunately failed so far to implement proper tools for discussion, drafting and adopting policies. The liquid-democracy-system they do have, has been ground into uselessness between the extremes of “online voting can’t be secret” and “I don’t want my political opinion attached to my identity”. Effectively, those who expend time, money and effort to travel to the party conventions still hold the most power. While these conventions regularly decent into a standstill because of procedural discussions, trolling etc.

IMHO, the Pirates didn’t succeed in separating the making of policies from the personalities of the actors. Too much bad blood because of that :frowning: Of course, once such policies are agreed upon, it needs charismatic public figureheads to explain them to the public.

Traditionally, yes, and there were quite a lot of these water boards (which apparently is the translation of “waterschap”). They started around the 13th century when central government decided that local water safety should be organised locally. Water safety has always been a big issue over here since the Netherlands is for 55% below sea level and the delta of a couple of big rivers. Water boards were generally a local community of farmers. For instance, farmers would build artificial hills (“terp”) to protect themselves against floods and would later on connect their terps by building dikes. They could then be granted authority over that dike, the right to raise taxes amoung the people benefiting from the dike and could even fine or punish people for doing things that increased flood risks.

Nowadays, the different boards are merged and cover entire water sheds and thus they don’t follow artificial borders. More and more people are saying that the water boards should be merged with other layers of government, but I quite like them for their uniqueness and their deep connection with Dutch history and the role they played in the way our country formed. Also, I quite like our dikes and polders and it’s somewhat soothing to know a separate governmental body with their own money is solely tasked with water safety issues.

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